Easy iPhone/Touch File Sharing with AFPd

AFPd has been added to the main installer.app repository from what I can tell. AFPd lets you connect to your device through the AFP file sharing protocol, meaning it will show up in your “Shared” places in Finder on a Mac. You “Connect As” the root account, so if you’re running firmware 1.1.1 and you haven’t changed it already, your password is alpine. I have only used this on the iPhone, but I’m assuming that it will work just the same on the Touch.

There was an implementation of this available as a manual install, but it seemed to require quite a bit of work to get things functional. This newly distributed version also gives you a GUI for configuring a few settings, such as whether the AFP sharing is active, and what the name of your device will show up as to other computers.

Using AFP doesn’t give you much more functionality than SSH+SFTP, but it makes it ridiculously easy to connect and move files around, since you can just use Finder. This also means you can connect with other people’s computers without installing any software, and you don’t have to worry about what your IP address actually is on your device, as long as you’re on the same local network as the computer you’re trying to connect from.